So, a friend emailed me about a study she thought I’d have some interest in. Yep, and I think you will, too—so much so that you’ll overlook the fact that I just blogged about sharing and Facebook last Tuesday.

This just-released ShareThis study provides numbers and gets even more granular about the types of content being shared, by whom, when and where.

Finance content produces no less than 68 million monthly social signals shared by more than 32 million monthly users, according to ShareThis’ three-month study (August to November 2014) of its network of 3.1 million sites and apps.

“Our findings revealed not only that finance is, in fact, a highly social topic but one with fascinating behavioral nuances, clear seasonal trends and favorable life stage alignment,” according to the ShareThis blog post.

One caveat: ShareThis’ numbers include real estate and accounting, which aren’t typically included in finance. Credit cards and currencies and foreign exchange topics lead the sharing, effectively propping up the numbers. That’s OK, the detail provided gets to the categories that the asset management industry most cares about—investing, funds, retirement and pension, financial planning and asset and portfolio management.

Tablets, Cyclicality, Life Stage

The entire study is embedded below so I’ll just extract a few ShareThis highlights here followed by the relevant page number in the deck. Two graphics in this post are from a separate ShareThis deck on Scribd.

Different social networks house entirely different conversations for finance consumers (see above and page 5).

Tablets are a finance-friendly platform, generating twice as much sharing activity around finance as other content categories. Booyah! (See page 6.)

See how the data on page 11 links the type of activity (searching and browsing or socializing) and the focus.

Sharing follows a consistent pattern, peaking in the beginning of the week.

Social volume spikes around key time periods like tax season and quarterly earnings. Activity often preempts or mirrors market events (page 8-9).

Finance sharing is aligned with life stage. “Often we found that sharing skews toward the extremes. For example, millennials and early boomers are 1.9x and 1.5x more likely, respectively, to share about finance.”

Financial planning social activity heats up April to August and then soars in December (see page 20).

I’ve heard this more than a few times from firms over the last six months. Typically, the firm has excelled with something else social (e.g., blog, Twitter account or LinkedIn company page) and believes it’s ready for something more challenging while potentially more rewarding.

The size of the social network itself (890 million daily active users in December 2014), its 2014 surge and the engagement potential all make Facebook impossible to ignore if you’re a marketer in 2015.

Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers absolutely should consider participation (beyond the base camps many have already set up) on Facebook for their own strategies. Not knowing what your business or marketing objectives are, not knowing what your client composition is, not knowing what your content and other resources are, etc., I can’t go much further than this.

…Except to encourage you to temper your enthusiasm by drilling into Facebook’s sensational traffic and engagement numbers. Financial services, let alone business-to-business organizations, cannot expect the same pick-up that other industries famously experience.

For some level-setting, let’s first take a broad look at social media and financial services. Afterward, we’ll zero in on Facebook.

10 Finserv Brands Dominate

There’s no shortage of ebooks and whitepapers about social media and financial services, but this Shareablee presentation delivered at a State of Financial Services Webinar in late November is distinguished by the data it presents. Unfortunately, the Webinar isn’t available on-demand.

Shareablee takes care to report financial services subsegments, noting that the lowest percentage (61%) of Investment Products & Services brands have social presences. Banking, insurance, loans and even payment services brands are more active. Data quoted is from January through October 2014. Note that LinkedIn isn't a platform included in this report. The annotations on the following slides are from me.

Here’s the sobering slide: The top 10 brands dominate, representing 66% of all activity. If you’ve been successful, by your standards, with anything in social media, you are to be congratulated. It’s not easy to make an impact.

Next check out the Shareablee slide of Facebook sharing in particular. Despite all the hoopla about Facebook in 2014 and despite the pick-up of insurance and banking content, note the so-so sharing of investment product/service content.

This gets to the core content challenge of asset manager posts on Facebook. If you are not a Fidelity or Vanguard, if you don't sponsor community outreach programs (e.g., charitable benefits or sporting events), if you're new to engaging with a community and if the bulk of what you have to post is investment strategy and market insights, let’s be realistic about how much sharing your repurposed posts are going to get. How comfortable is a suit and tie at a barbecue?

Minor digression: Before we leave the Shareablee deck, see the slide that shows the types of posts that people engage with. Across all financial services segments—but especially investment products and services—it’s photos! If you make just one tweak to your social strategy in all of 2015, please let it be to post more images.

Does Facebook Drive Traffic?

Why take on another social network and especially Facebook? To drive both brand awareness and Website traffic. So, does Facebook drive traffic? All of the above was a prelude to encouraging Facebook-aspirants to watch the following Whiteboard Friday video, published on The Moz Blog last week. A transcript is also available on the page.

It’s an engaging 17 minutes but if you’re short on time, here are a few highlights.

4:00: The Moz’s Rand Fishkin says the average page per visit of a Facebook visitor is about 1. “It tends to be the case that when you're in that Facebook feed, you're just trying to consume content, and you might see something, but you're unlikely to browse around the rest of the Website from which it came.”

This compares to the average 3-5 pages consumed by people who arrive directly on your site and to Google search-sourced visits (2-2.5 pages on average). Obviously, you’ll want check your analytics to see how your various traffic sources perform.

6:48: But, Fishkin notes, “Facebook's likes and shares are very indicative of the kinds of content that tend to perform well in search. So, if we can nail that, if we understand what kinds of content get spread socially on the Web and engage people on the social Web, we tend to also perform well in the kind of content we create for search engines.”

7:38: Fishkin begins his top 10 tips for Facebook optimization.

8:56: A social referral/introduction may lead to subsequent Website exploration. Here's a brief discussion of setting up analytics to track future visits from social referrals, and see this post for more.

12:43: Fishkin discusses limitations on the reach of brand content, a relatively recent adjustment Facebook made to dim the effect of what had been overwhelming brand content. The objective is to enable personal content, typically valued by users more, to resurface.

14:27: Facebook is difficult to "game" nowadays but it is still possible to “game human psychology,” says Fishkin. “If you can find the angles that people care about, that they're vocal about, that they get engaged, excited, angry, passionate, of any emotional variety about those things, that's how you tend to trigger a lot of activity on Facebook,” he says. Don't produce that kind of content yet? You'll need to.

If Facebook is a frontier you aim to settle in 2015, I'm rooting for you. Of course, an asset manager can succeed on Facebook. Just do your preparation, make sure you understand the level of new effort required, including some level of advertising spending, and be sure to track your results/effectiveness.

The old way involved closed doors, guarded discussions and hushed voices until an organization was ready to unilaterally spring change on its business partners and customers. (And we wonder why that didn’t always work so well?)

That’s not how change is introduced today. More often than not, the new way starts with an idea—sometimes not fully baked—and involves pilot tests, trial balloons, beta launches and other forms of vetting by "the crowd."

For example: Have you seen the “performance clock” published in the February/March 2015 Morningstar Magazine? This link will open page 34 of Morningstar’s Nxtbook magazine reader, you might need to give it an extra second or two.

The performance clock offers a different way of looking at monthly returns of indexes or securities over time. It appropriates the face of an analog clock, showing monthly returns for the 12 months of a calendar year. The length of each line shows the absolute performance for each month. January is at the 1 o’clock position. Green lines present positive months and negative months are shown in red. When the returns or losses are small in some months, the lines very short.

“We’re thinking of making it a regular feature in our Data Dashboard toward the back of the magazine,” Editor-in-Chief Jerry Kerns told me in a response to an email I’d sent. “It would track the performance of [market] indexes throughout the year.“

In the note accompanying the feature in the magazine, Kerns asked for feedback, including whether Morningstar software users would want to see an interactive visualization. Per the new way, why invest programming resources unless there’s some demonstrated user interest in it?

Morningstar acknowledges that the visualization conveys the same information as a standard bar chart. In answer to a direct question from me, Kerns said, “I think it could replace monthly bar charts. It hammers home that volatility comes not just from the downside.”

Kerns elaborated, “I think the clocks work best when they’re being used to compare or provide context. Say that the performance of two funds with similar mandates is correlated—both funds produce positive and negative returns during the same months. But what if one fund was more volatile—its up and down months were more extreme? The performance clocks of these two funds, presented side by side, would show that. The volatility of the one fund would really stand out.”

I like the clocks and found myself spending much more time with them than I would with bar charts. I appreciate new efforts to aid investor understanding. At the same time, I should admit that I’m a pushover for whatever's new.

Does The Clock Toll For You?

Every mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketer knows to keep an eye on what Morningstar’s up to. In fund communications alone, we have Morningstar to thank for introducing the style box (in 1992, according to this corporate PDF) and of course there are the star ratings that appear on most fact sheets and fund profile pages.

I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that a new and improved visualization from Morningstar might eventually influence your presentations of market or fund performance.

Who else has a say in how fund companies present data? The financial advisors who distribute your products, the wholesalers who represent them, FINRA, Compliance, your fund data automation vendor, in-house designers all have a stake, too.

Just to test the waters, I reached out and asked Synthesis and Kurtosys, two marketing communications automation solutions providers mentioned here before—see this post and this—for their reactions. These people are information design professionals, with the battle scars from having to automate scads of data, graphics and text for an array of asset manager communications. They are not easily impressed.

“How would the performance clock work, either in fund fact sheets or online?” was what I wanted to know.

Some Reservations

Stipulated: There’s no doubt that a tabular presentation of fund return data is the most complete information a fund company can provide. If the clock visualization was used to present fund performance and/or index performance, it would likely be supplemental as most fund company graphics are.

Even so, the fund automation vendors have their reservations.

On the plus side, said Synthesis product manager Noel Rodolfo, “One of the benefits of this chart is that it should take up less real estate than a bar chart (even with data labels added, as I would suggest). And the clock hands’ length is the absolute value since positive/negative is denoted with a color. Nice, that will save some space.”

However, Rodolfo noted that reliance on color alone for positive and negative returns will be a challenge for the color blind. Ultimately, he thinks a benchmark comparison—involving two clocks side by side—will be more difficult and take the user too long to analyze the differences.

“I’ve seen these charts used by the fund ‘technicals’ on an institutional level, at French and Swiss firms mostly,” said Matt Stone, marketing director for Kurtosys.

Stone called clock charts interesting but confusing. “They save space and can help report on seasonality, but they are frighteningly hard to read for most. Both the positive and negative values go in the same outward direction.”

Stone said Kurtosys doesn’t see much reinventing of the wheel related to fund performance. On the other hand, marketers are turning to infographics for “the freedom to experiment and be more original. But the aim,” Stone reminded, “should always be to provide clarity, precision and efficiency.”

Your turn—whether you’re a marketer, financial advisor or Other—to weigh in on the performance clock. Your comments are welcome here, of course. You might also want to share your thoughts with Kerns. After all, early response from our crowd should be the benefit of Morningstar’s providing a first look.

In the brief history of blogs on mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) Websites, the stickiest point of contention between Marketing and Compliance has been the ability to accept and respond to comments.

Marketing: “But if we don't allow comments, how is this different from any other page we publish with market or investment commentary?”

Compliance: “Well, you’re the ones who want to call it a blog.”

As it happens, this stalemate was short-lived. In the last few years, marketers have prevailed, successfully making the case for the benefits to the firm of using comments to listen, learn and demonstrate responsiveness.

Quite a few firms have opened their sites and blogs to comments. Such permissions have been accompanied by yards of moderation rules and disclosure but that’s to be expected.

Even in the absence of comments, there are more and more signs of a firm’s desire, or tolerance, for a two-way dialogue. And, the hint of the presence of a community can be found on domains controlled by asset managers.

I believe that firms’ generally positive experiences fielding comments on platforms they don’t control (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) have led to less anxiety about the risk of comments posted on sites they can control. Moderation capabilities—including simply choosing not to allow the posting of a submitted comment—can go a long way. It’s also true that the firms are not the troll target that many feared.

Here’s a quick status report on how asset managers are inviting feedback on the content they publish. I should note that this review is happening just as a few well trafficked Websites such as Bloomberg Business and Copyblogger recently dropped comments. They say conversations belong on social media.

Go Big

The BlackRock blog has started to embrace commenting in a big way. See the center bar on its home page which contains a question related to the most recent post. The Add Your Voice button links to a comment box at the bottom of the post. Clicking on the BlackRock tab prompts a flyout box showing rankings of all discussions and commenters.

Last September, we looked at BlackRock’s advisor community site, which was an ambitious undertaking. This is a natural extension for the firm to encourage blog visitors to “join the conversation” and, from the looks of it, relatively simple to execute using a Disqus integration with the WordPress blog.

Social Sharing Icons

Simply put, if you'd like your content to be shared more on social platforms, your site or blog needs to offer social sharing icons. And, sharing can be a prelude to commentary that happens on those platforms. This is out of the moderation reach and, unless you have systems in place, out of the awareness of some firms.

I commented on the growing prevalence of the icons on mutual fund and ETF sites, including blogs, in a 2011 post. However, some firms continue to face Compliance resistance.

Comments may be turned off on American Century’s blog, but the social sharing counters and the popup of the Most Popular ranking support the user’s experience. The star ratings and total votes combine to provide an alternative form of navigation courtesy of previous visitors to the site—the reviews they've left behind identify what’s good on the site.

Making Thought Leaders Accessible

The Voya blog offers an Ask a Question feature. There’s none of the authenticity that comes with published account names, there's no date accompanying the question, the investment strategist who answered the specific question isn't named and there’s no opportunity for follow-up, which blog comments enable. It's a controlled yielding of the floor and the content focus to address what an individual reader is interested in. Despite its limitations, it has the effect of making Voya thought leaders accessible.

Not Now Doesn’t Mean Never

When Vanguard started blogging in 2009, I noted that comments were not accepted. It didn’t take long before comments were enabled and some visitors to the investors blog went to town. At the extreme, 472 comments have been submitted to a 2010 post on When to Start Saving Your Retirement Savings and it continues to top the blog’s Most Discussed ranking.

Vanguard accepts comments on its advisors and institutional blogs, but commenting there is much less common.

As shown below, Franklin Templeton's Beyond Bulls & Bears blog and a few other firms collect comments while acknowledging they won’t be posting just yet.

Twitter Widgets—Yes, But…

Several firms publish a Twitter widget on their blogs, which would seem to be a low-friction way of presenting commentary from other parties. However, this screenshot from the Principal blog is typical of all embedded tweets that I’ve seen published on asset manager domains. The feed is of the firm’s tweets only as opposed to all replies or mentions. This isn't surprising, there’s no telling what kinds of commentary would be published on an unfiltered feed.

But there's another consideration, too. A Twitter widget embedded on your own site can point visitors to content that you shared either on your site or off. By contrast, the interactions your account has with others would be less valuable and may be less effective in prompting people to follow the account. Even when configured to show just your account's tweets, though, the presence of a Twitter widget suggests the firm's participation in and even availability to the community.

Asset management marketing is getting increasingly sophisticated. To support that statement, I’d point to mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms’ heightened capture and reliance on business intelligence and analytics, integrated communications across multiple channels, the increasing mastery of non-text forms of communicating.

Segmentation, for example, is an area where firms are making strides. The more customized, even personalized a communication, the greater its relevance.

But I’m wondering where investment management marketers are on what may be the most fundamental segment of all: gender. Does your customer relationship management system (CRM) capture the gender of your contacts? Can you/do you run reports segregating male financial advisors from females to isolate differences in response and even AUM and sales?

My experience, and my impression corroborated with a few additional pings to others in the industry, is that the overall availability of information about the gender of database contacts is spotty.

Gender is a custom field in both Salesforce and SalesPage CRMs. But while it’s relatively trivial to add, it must be identified as a requirement—and at many firms that hasn’t happened. Capturing gender data isn’t a priority for Sales, which tends to drive CRM implementations.

Granted, most of the contacts in an asset manager’s CRM are going to be male. But, according to data kasina reported in 2013, female advisors made up 17% of advisors across all intermediary channels. That's plenty of female names as well as uncommon names or names that could go either way (e.g., Pat Allen) that justify a mandatory gender field.

Learning From Social Media Analytics

The insights being gleaned from social media use are what prompt the question now. Underlying virtually every social platform is a database that’s core to its value. The networks, and third parties with access to the APIs, produce demographic analyses that can be quite helpful to understand who an account is reaching and whether content adjustments are necessary, as is often the case.

The content I selected to tweet over the last six years is what attracted this group to the account. Seeing this was both eye-opening and sobering. These people look like they mean business. No, I won’t be bothering them with my real-time insights about The Bachelor.

At the same time, analysis of aggregated usage data is resulting in reports and commentary drawing gender distinctions between what works on social networks. To wit:

“Pinterest’s Problem: Getting Men to Commit” was the headline of a Wall Street Journal article that offered “gender differences in information processing” as one reason for Pinterest’s unpopularity with men. Studies by Joan Meyers-Levy, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota, “have shown that women are able to process information more comprehensively and do so at a lower threshold. Men are more selective and tend to focus on the essentials…

In other words, Pinterest’s busy design may create an information overload for men. “If this was a magazine, they’d turn the page,” Ms. Meyers-Levy is quoted as saying. “It works for females because they like detail, they like more complexity.”

I read this article and then headed over to a busy, busy fund profile page. Hmmm.

Several conclusions are being made based on differences in how social media is being used.

Women are more vocal, expressive and willing to share, reports BrandWatch in this post aggregating gender data from multiple social media survey sources.More women use Facebook and Twitter. They’re interested in making connections and staying in touch. More women than men (58% vs. 42%) consume news in social media. The data show that women are more active altogether, more active on mobile devices and more likely to follow and interact with brands.

Men, who outnumber women on LinkedIn, use social media to gather the information they need to build influence—they perform research, gather relevant contacts and ultimately increase their status.

Closer to home, Putnam’s December 2014 research on financial advisor use of social media was the first work (I believe) to report in-depth on advisor gender differences. The findings track other research, showing that women financial advisors do more but also benefit more when using social media for business. The screenshot at right is from Putnam’s infographic and shows that 71% of social media-using female advisor respondents gained clients versus 64% of male advisors. Their average asset gain of $5.6 million is more than three times the median of $1.7 million, slightly more than the average male gain of $5.5 million.

Most interesting are the gender differences between the social media content that advisors react to. According to the Putnam data, female advisors are far more likely to respond to your blogs, podcasts and slideshows.

Pursuing More Hits Than Misses (Absolutely No Pun Intended)

An irony is that financial advisors themselves are increasingly focusing on gender differences between their male and female clients—with help from a few asset managers’ value-added programs.

Most mutual fund and ETF content teams today are somewhere in between producing just what’s required (the legacy of the good old days when the time and expense of print served as a natural limiter) and churning out as much as fast as they can. As the range broadens and volume rises to take advantage of burgeoning opportunities, the chances are that there will be more misses than hits.

A better command of the demographics of the names in your database could help steer some of this. Also: Tracking such data might help mitigate the risk and/or address challenges that arise when a disproportionate number of females are involved in the process of creating fund communications directed at salespeople and users that skew largely male.

Those of you with consistent, reliable data on the male/female composition of your database have an advantage. You’re able to study and understand any response differences that may exist. You can compare the demographic reach (including gender and other dimensions) of your owned communications with your social communications. You can test whatever content adjustments seem indicated. You could plan all-male or all-female communications, I suppose, but I’d tread carefully making any assumptions there.

Sales may have limited interest in documenting a contact’s gender in the CRM because they pride themselves on knowing the top 250 producers they’re focusing on—they don't have to check to see who's a woman and who's a man! If Marketing’s charge is to better understand and nurture the interest of everybody else, isn’t gender an obvious piece of data to begin to collect and understand?